into the corner of a barn, virtually sever- ing his lower leg. He shattered his teeth and fractured his back, hip, legs, collar- bone, shoulder, ribs. He was once so badly mauled that the newspapers an- nounced his death. But he came back every time, struggling through pain and fear and the limitations of his body to do the only thing he had ever wanted to do. And in the one lucky moment of ills unlucky life he found Seabiscuit, a horse as damaged and persistent as he was. I hung Red's picture above my desk and began to write. What began as an article for Ameri- can Heritage became an obsession, and in the next two years the obsession became a book. Borden and I moved to a cheap rental house farther downtown, and I arranged my life around the project. At the local library, I pored over documents and microfilm I requisitioned from the Library of Congress. If I looked down at my work, the room spun, so I perched my laptop on a stack of books in myof- fice, and Borden jerry-rigged a device that held documents verticall)!. When I was too tired to sit at my desk, I set the laptop up on my bed. When I was too dizzy to read, I lay down and wrote with my eyes closed. Living in my subjects' bodies, I forgot about my own. I mailed the manuscript off to Ran- dom House in September, 2000, then fell into bed. I was lying there the fol- lowing day when the room began to gyrate. Reviewing the galleys brought me close to vomiting several times a da)!. Most of the gains I had made since 1995 were lost. I spent each afternoon sitting with Fangfoss on my back steps, watch- ing the world undulate and sliding into despair. I n March of 2001, Random House released "Seabiscuit: An American Legend." Five days later, I was lying down, when the phone rang. "You are a best-selling writer," my editor said. I screamed. Two weeks later, I picked up the phone to hear him and my agent shout in tandem, "You're No.1!"Borden threw a window open and yelled it to the neighborhood. That spring, as I tried to cope with the dreamy unreality of success and the continuing failure of my health, some- thing began to change in Borden. At meals, he sat in silence, his gaze discon- nected, his jaw muscles working. His sentences trailed off in the middle. He couldn't sleep or eat. He was falling away from me, and I didn't knowwh)!. He came into my office one night in June, sat down, and slid his chair up to me, touching his knees to mine. I looked at his face. He was still young and hand- some, his hair black, his skin seamless. But the color was gone from his lips, the quickness from his eyes. He tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth wa- vered. He dropped his chin to his chest. He began to speak, and fourteen years of unvoiced emotions spilled out: the torment of watching the woman he loved suffer; his feelings of responsibility and helplessness and anger; his longing for children we probably couldn't have; the endless strain of living in obedience to an extraordinarily volatile disease. We talked for much of the night. I found myself revealing all the grief that I had hidden from him. When I asked him why he hadn't said anything before, he said he thought I would shatter. I re- alized that I had feared the same of him. In protecting each other from the awful repercussions of our misfortune, we had become strangers. When we were too tired to talk any- more, I went into the bedroom and sat down alone. I slid his ring from my fin- ger and dropped it into a drawer. We spent a long, painful summer talk- ing, and tor both of us there were sur- prises. I didn't shatter, and neither did he. 1 " : :P -........:,;..... . . . ' ... . .'" . . . ,. . . f01 . u . . .. ' . ' .: \j ,:- i : .... "n. . .- :: : . \f M: : I prepared myself for him to leave, but he didn't. We became, for the first time since our days at Kenyon, alive with each other. O ne night that fall, I walked to the back of the yard. .As F angfoss hunted imagtnary mice in the grass, I looked out at the hill behind the house. Beyond it, downtown Washington hummed like an idling engine, the city lights radiating over the ridge. I looked west, where a line of row-house chimneys filed down the hill until they became indistinguishable from the trunks of the walnut trees at the road's end. Borden came out and joined me briefly, draping his arms over my shoulders, then he went inside. I watched the screen door slap behind him. As I turned back, I saw a slit of light arc over the houses and vanish behind the trees. It was the first meteor I had seen since that night in Linc's car. I thought, for the first time in a long time, of the deer. In the depths of illness, I believed that the deer had crashed through the wind- shield and ushered me into an existence in which the only possibility was suffering. I was haunted by his form in :front of the car, his bent knee, the seeming inevitability of catastrophe, and the ruin my life became. I had forgotten the critical moment. The deer's knee didn't straighten. He didn't step into our path, we didn't strike him, and I didn't die. As sure as I was that he had taken everything from me, I was wrong. The car passed him and moved on. . ' t;w+ ;='" 7 , : b3V ' . "0, ',,,,"..""' .. .:");.:. - :-. Th. EF i H U: "Did you hear that Henderson ascended to Heaven amid the entire angelic assembly? You can't buy publicity like that. "